Dulce et Decorum

The other night, I had a drink with two of the soldiers who collectively wrote a New York Times Op-Ed piece, published in August. They argued, with a thoughtful, hard-earned realism, that the war in Iraq can’t be won by Americans or on American terms—that our policies and methods are “incongruent” with conditions in Iraq. Fred Kaplan, who introduced me to the soldiers, has written about the importance of the Op-Ed, which went surprisingly unnoticed, and about the tragedy that two of its authors were subsequently killed and a third severely wounded. The soldiers did not vet their Op-Ed with a commanding officer before publishing it, having looked up their rights in the Uniform Code of Military Justice and decided that what they had written constituted free speech, not insubordination or treason. The response in their unit and their chain of command was almost uniformly positive.

What struck me in our conversation was that these two soldiers were not completely disillusioned with the Army or with the difficult type of warfare that Iraq forced on them. One of them had recently been promoted and plans to stay in the Army; the other admitted that he wanted to go back to Iraq. They hope to write, with other soldiers, a book about counterinsurgency that would examine the Army’s new field manual against their experience fighting the complex array of warring factions in Iraq—not to refute it but to improve it. In short, they’re exactly the sort of soldiers the Army needs to keep. I wonder how long their precious knowledge will be valued by a military and a country that already show signs of wanting to consign Iraq to the memory hole where, three decades ago, Vietnam disappeared.

The testimony of soldiers fresh from the fight carries a weight that no journalist or politician can attain, and there’s an important modern tradition of warriors speaking out against what they’ve just seen and done. It might have begun with Siegfried Sassoon’s statement denouncing the pointless slaughter on the Western Front, in July, 1917. After the intervention of Robert Graves and other friends, Sassoon, whose battlefield courage had won him the nickname “Mad Jack,” was not court-martialled but instead shipped off for psychiatric help to Craiglockhart Hospital, in Scotland. There he met Wilfred Owen and underwent several months of talk therapy with a psychiatrist who knew that the patient was completely sane. In the end, Sassoon decided to return to the battlefield—not because he’d changed his mind about the war but because he believed that he owed it to his men. (The story is told in the superb first volume of Pat Barker’s fictional “Regeneration” trilogy, which was made into a faithful, little seen film, “Behind the Lines.”)

The most famous American example of the tradition is the Winter Soldier Investigation, a conference held by members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, in Detroit, in early 1971, at which soldiers recounted atrocities that they and others had committed in Vietnam. This event led to the young John Kerry’s famous testimony before a Senate committee (“How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”), for which he was attacked, to devastating effect, in 2004.

The authors of the Iraq Op-Ed ended their critique of the war by saying, “We need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through.” This was more in the spirit of Sassoon than of Kerry. So far, the soldiers have been neither court-martialled nor hospitalized for psychiatric care. Once Iraq ceases to be an active fight and becomes a historical controversy, will they be Swift-boated? If so, we will have learned nothing from the war that has taught them so much and claimed the lives of their comrades.